Being wanted is the best feeling in the world. Cheap Trick said it best: “I want you to want me. I need you to need me” Well, my developer friends, 2018 is your year. Businesses in practically every industry have a fever. And the only prescription? You. I know, I know. The demand for developers is nothing new. But 2018 is …

Abstraction is one of the key concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. Its main goal is to handle complexity by hiding unnecessary details from the user. That enables the user to implement more complex logic on top of the provided abstraction without understanding or even thinking about all the hidden complexity. That’s a very generic concept that’s not limited to …

Every software development team is under a lot of pressure to ship product improvements as fast as possible. Most organizations now use agile methodologies and DevOps practices to ship software faster than ever. The reality is that software development is still a messy process. A potential byproduct of every software deployment are new software defects that are found in production, …

Working with containers provides a lot of benefits. They are a lot faster to spin up and shut down than virtual machines. They run everywhere, which gives you the benefit of having the exact same environment locally as in production. And because they run everywhere, you can run them in any cloud or on-premises, which prevents you from being locked …

Let’s do a visualization exercise. Imagine it’s December 31, 2018, and you’re ringing in the New Year with your friends and family. You think back on everything that you accomplished in the last year: your company’s revenue is through the roof thanks to the success of your product, and you were promoted to Lead Developer. 2019 is poised to be …

Introduction to Spring Security In this article, you’ll learn how to quickly and easily configure and set up a Spring Security based web application using the Java configuration. Security is, not surprisingly, an evergrowing concern and certainly a core focus of any developer working on applications today. Project Setup The fastest way to get on track with Spring Security is …

If you’re tired of manually inputting errors into Axosoft, we have exciting news for you. Stackify wants you to save time and be more productive when developing applications. That’s why the latest Retrace update, you can now export errors reported by Retrace directly into Axosoft’s issue management software for tracking. Retrace is the only Application Performance Management (APM) tool that …

One of the great features of ASP.NET is all the metrics available via Windows performance counters. There is a wide array of them available between IIS, ASP.NET and .NET. This guide on ASP.NET performance counters will review some of the top counters you need to know about and why they are valuable. We will also talk about how to monitor …

As the Microsoft framework becomes more powerful (and more popular), the more important it will be to stay abreast of the latest news and updates. Luckily there is an entire ecosystem of teachers, writers, thinkers, and speakers that are dedicated to pushing .NET forward. You’ve surely come across a few of the big time .NET blogs already. Scott Hanselman is …

We already talked a lot about exception handling on this blog and described the differences between checked and unchecked exceptions, best practices and common mistakes. If you’ve read these posts, you probably recognized a pattern. You should provide detailed information about the situation that caused the exception, and you should not remove anything that might be useful to the caller. …

Performance counters are really important for monitoring and troubleshooting problems with your .NET applications. The full .NET Framework provides a wide array of performance counters that are very useful for troubleshooting application problems. Some examples of important performance counters are garbage collection and exception rates. Without these, you will be flying blind. In this article we will discuss how to …

Introduction This is an in-depth look at the powerful features and internal workings of Spring Web MVC, which is a part of the Spring Framework. The source code for this article is available over on GitHub. Project Setup Throughout this article, we’ll use the latest and greatest Spring Framework 5. We’re focusing here on the Spring’s classic web stack, which …

It has never been a better time to be a developer. Development tools and technologies continue to evolve that allow us to create better software. However, developers are under more pressure to decrease time to market, publish frequent enhancements, and reduce or eliminate bugs. The cloud offers several unique benefits to developers that can help. Some of the details mentioned …

Most developers expect that performance optimization is a complicated topic that requires a lot of experience and knowledge. Okay, that’s not entirely wrong. Optimizing an application to get the best performance possible isn’t an easy task. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything if you haven’t acquired that knowledge. There are several easy to follow recommendations and best …

Almost every application these days communicates over HTTP: websites, RESTful services, and even SOAP APIs all make use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol. For the most part, we don’t worry too much about what is happening at the network level when we’re building these applications. However, from time to time a problem will show up that needs us to drop to …

ASP.NET is one of the most successful web application development frameworks by Microsoft. With every update, new and extended features are added that help developers deploy highly scalable and high-performance web applications. When coupled with application monitoring and other performance tools, such as a profiler, ASP.NET becomes a powerful solution for building incredible apps. Within the framework itself, there are …

Let’s Talk Logs Application and server logs are the eyes and ears for developers when it comes to troubleshooting application problems. Traditional log management solutions do not provide any features for tracking and identifying application errors. What’s worse, multiple users using your application at the same time can cause a major tangle in your logs. Sorting through your logs to …

Overview of Java application metrics Monitoring a running application is crucial for visibility and making sure the system is functioning as expected, as well as to identify any potential issues, tweak and optimize the running conditions, and resolve any errors that may occur. This is where Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools can make your life a whole lot easier by …

Overview of JVM Metrics In this article, we’ll cover how you can monitor an application that runs on the Java Virtual Machine by going over some of the critical metrics you need to track. And, as a monitoring tool, we’ll use Stackify Retrace, a full APM solution. The application we’ll monitor to exemplify these metrics is a real-world Java web …

There are multiple ways to handle asynchronous code in JavaScript today. In this post, we’ll explore the three most popular async options by making an HTTP call to the jsonplaceholder API. Callback Functions Call me, maybe. Functions are first-class in JavaScript. This means you can pass functions around as arguments, and return functions from functions. Handy. When JavaScript was first released, callbacks were the standard …